From Bush:
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities.
Replace memex with net and you have the most brazen prediction of a wiki pre-1994.
Englebart focuses on another revelation by Bush, the concept of what we now call tags, electronic codes that identify associated groups of discrete bits of knowledge. Englebart seems to conceptualize the collaborative uses of Bush from memex to database. He offers less speculation than Bush because he has better technology, but he also seems to settle for human to computer production with limited sharing capabilities (advanced for the time, but limited by Bush's view). There's a slight failure to embrace the human collaborative and sharing available in the furthest extent of Bush's ideas. However, he does comment upon associative 'linking' that will eventual suggest how we shape the interactive method of the early web. I think Englebart did wonders in moving Bush's theory to a working concept, even if his practical answers (limited by the card technology of his time) somewhat slowed the full promise of Bush's memex goal. However, he makes up for this by almost exactly predicting a type of HTML, though his HTML concept is too visible to the average user. The beauty of HTML is that Joe wouldn't have been puzzled after two minutes surfing the web revealed via clandestine code.
While I have fond hopes for many types of technology, I largely reject technological determinism, have for many years. So it likely isn't a huge surprise that I have issues with McLuhan. Consider this statement:
Consequently, he had nothing to report. Had his methods been employed in 1500 AD to discover the effects of the printed book in the lives of children or adults, he could have found out nothing of the changes in human and social psychology resulting from typography. Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century. Program and "content" analysis offer no clues to the magic of these media or to their subliminal charge.
Now, I believe print drastically affected global culture, but Kuhn, Hobbes, Kant, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and a hundred others helped create many of the systems McLuhan attributes simply to print. They would have done so as orators, like Cicero and Plato before them, without it.
Form is important to understand, but McLuhan's argument of content having no place in understanding the affect of a form in the arena of social sciences lacks logical historical awareness, and uses anecdote in its place. The irony of McLuhan's strong Classical education in this fact does amuse me, however.
It is also important to note that people have always possessed some level of speciality(Farmers, Smiths, Tanners, and other Anglican surnames show this); even the invoked warrior class is a speciality, as was the ruling orator of classical times. Some hold more prestige than others, but specialization alone does not make one a slave.
I enjoyed Williams spelling out the history of invention with few value judgments. Saving the argument for later, after the facts are on the table, always promotes a more convincing case to me. I also tend to see social and technological evolution in resource and demand terms. Technology generally solves a problem, and the use of that technology might enhance the positive and/or negative aspects of any communal grouping. The society must own the purpose of the technology, actively and with great awareness.
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